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shrimp miku

happy bisexual visibility day to this unholy non-discriminating trio

HEY GUYS I JUST GOT AN EMAIL ABOUT TRADEMARK ISSUES FROM TUMBLR I—

A day at the lake

so I got into grad school today with my shitty 2.8 gpa and the moral of the story is reblog those good luck posts for the love of god

Happy Dannyversary!!  Have a boy in the middle of an existential crisis, what better way to celebrate

we sent Earth’s apex predator to space and she learned humanity 

frozen ground - cant bury you until summer

PLEASE for the love of the universe read anti-colonial science fiction and fantasy written from marginalized perspectives. Y’all (you know who you are) are killing me. To see people praise books about empire written exclusively by white women and then turn around and say you don’t know who Octavia Butler is or that you haven’t read any NK Jemisin or that Babel was too heavy-handed just kills me! I’m not saying you HAVE to enjoy specific books but there is such an obvious pattern here

Some of y’all love marginalized stories but you don’t give a fuck about marginalized creators and characters, and it shows. Like damn

And I realized with the latest round of stupidity that nonblack ppl and perhaps even some black ppl unfamiliar w the US just don’t seem to understand what a race riot is. It’s bad enough that Louis is blamed for it, but the discussion around Claudia’s turning is so totally removed from context once again bc Blackness is not taken seriously as a category of analysis. But race riots are part of genocide like it’s not a typical or even mildly heightened form of violence, it is the epitome of white supremacist violence that murdered so many Black ppl, often entirely randomly, just if white ppl got mad and took out that anger through state sanctioned massacres of Black Americans, but sometimes they’d try to pin it on a perceived or fabricated slight by a Black person, as if a disdainful look at a white woman or talking back to a white man was grounds for a murder spree and mass rape (which was already always happening anyway, because white men raped Black women much more often than they lynched Black men, as rape is always used under genocidal state policy, which this was). The race riot in the show was historical fact, it wasn’t made up just for the show, and why do we think it matters that we’re told that whites used to hang enslaved Black people on the pike where Louis stabs fenwick? But Black ppl couldn’t and didn’t just rush in and massacre entire white neighborhoods.

What the show is trying to tell us here is not that Louis is irrational or purposefully put his community in that position, but that even if you did take a Black man and make him a vampire, make it possible for him to pay back in blood just a small fraction of the racism he and his ppl have faced, that’s still not enough, because these aren’t individual issues, Fenwick’s racism was not a unique flaw, it was the law of the land, it was the system, and the system would never tolerate any Black person’s minor liberating moment. Imagine if Louis caught on fire while walking through storyville to try to see if there was anything he could do in the midst of this worst nightmare. It’s one thing for him to blame himself the way so many colonized people have blamed themselves for any colonial violence that came about bc they “stepped out of line” in asserting their humanity against the colonizer whose life goal is to deny that humanity, but it’s another thing entirely for the viewer to minimize what was quite frankly genocide (and I don’t use this lightly or flippantly, Jim Crow was literally genocide and the race riots were heightened massacres within that continuous genocide—the nazis copied Jim Crow law and social conditioning to build the holocaust, and you must be willing to acknowledge this when viewing historical fiction) and another thing entirely for Louis’ white partner to minimize this by suggesting they commemorate this by making it their wedding anniversary. The closest disgusting white liberal minimization of Black suffering I can think of in our contemporary moment is like if a white man told his Black fiancée that they should throw the wedding ceremony at a former plantation . Surely we can understand why calling it emotional abuse if the Black man broke up with his white partner would be racist.

But you’re not going to make this connection if you don’t take race riots seriously, and you won’t take the race riots seriously if you don’t acknowledge the centrality of race in this story. It also completely changes how you understand Louis begging his materially powerful white husband to help save the only Black person he could save. It changes how you interpret the depiction of Louis during the trial in 207. And it definitely changes how you interpret Louis saying I was just glad nobody wanted to lynch me while sitting to the materially powerful nonblack man who did try to lynch him and successfully lynched the Black girl that Louis saved from genocide a century ago. There’s certainly a tragedy in a disabled Black girl coming into this world that so completely denies her space, but do we villainize Black parents for having children nonetheless? Having children is an essentially selfish act—was every other Black children born the night of a race riot doomed to early death, though statistics might suggest they should be? Armand says she’s too young too disempowered too traumatized too marginalized; she had to die. Was it emotional abuse for Louis to demand of Lestat that this one lives?

It's been a while

Nimona movie made me remember what I loved about Nimona book

wdym this isn’t how heros united went 🙄?

someone save bro

I present:

Hatsune Phantom

Gym 101

In which Valerie forces Danny to go workout with her

[ao3]

Characters: Danny & Valerie Warnings: None Wc: 2,230

****

"You're not engaging your core, Danny. What do I keep telling you?" Valerie sighed and put down her weight. "You're going to fuck up your knees if you don't slow down and do this right."

"And I keep telling you I don't even know what that means!" Danny snapped, not for the first time this week and probably not the last.

When he told Valerie that he, Danny Fenton, was also Danny Phantom, Danny had been expecting Valerie to be so mad at him that she never wanted to speak to him again.

And, well, she had been that mad at him. Very mad, in fact. So pissed, that for a minute, Danny was worried she was going to blast him off her roof.

He hadn't stuck around long after that.

And while he was beginning to make himself comfortable in the campground called, "Valerie's Cold Shoulder," he barely had two days to settle in before she had seemingly decided that enough was enough. 

Just before homeroom began, she strode to him in the hall, pulled him to the side—literally, she yanked him around the corner by his shirt sleeve—and demanded they start hitting the gym together.

"Because," Valerie had explained at his whining, and not patiently either, "I get that you have ghost powers, but your human half is such a twig. Seriously, Danny, do you know how much you're holding yourself back right now? If you actually tried strength training, I bet you'd level up pretty hardcore in ghost fights. Who knows? You might be able to train your reflexes to dodge one of Skulker's blasts from time to time."

And well, that bruise to both Danny's ghostly ego and his human teenage boy ego had been all he needed to agree to start working out with none other than his former rival turned ally, Valerie Gray.

"Stand up straight," Valerie ordered, pulling him back to his present world of pain.

He had no idea how Jazz and his mom liked doing this stuff. At the current moment, he was pretty sure the person who invented the concept of lifting weights was a giant masochist because there was simply no way in hell anyone throughout history would have ever said, "You know what sounds like the most fun thing ever? Let's take heavy objects, lift them, do a little movement, and then put them back down in the same spot we lifted them from!"

But apparently, he was the weirdo for not understanding why there was a dedicated fanbase of people who put a metal bar on their back, put some weights on the sides of the bar, squatted into a crouch, and then stood back up.

And repeated the process.

Again.

And again.

And again. Ten times, resting, and then ten more times.

Danny weakly stood, gripping the bar behind his shoulders like it was the only thing tethering his will to live to this plane of existence, and glared at Valerie through sweaty bangs. "Okay, standing. What next?"

"We godda fix your core."

"Be my guest," Danny said. He wasn't even sure if Valerie could fix something he'd never had to begin with, but if she truly wanted to, then...whatever. He'd lost by coming here, anyway.

Valerie scrutinized him as if he was some sort of science project that wasn't quite working out how she'd hoped. Which, thinking about it for a moment, he figured that was probably exactly what he was to Valerie. 

Then, without warning, she put her hand on his stomach.

Now, Phantom was largely considered a very suave and cool hero. Well, maybe Sam and Tucker would disagree, and sure there was a whole TikTok tag dedicated to videos of him falling into random objects, but still. There were enough random people around who would agree that Phantom was at least somewhat socially sufficient.

But Fenton on the other hand was very much not. He was an awkward, goofy teen. He wasn't popular, and he didn't exactly have a lot of girls fawning over him at every turn.

Which was why Valerie, his former girlfriend who maybe he still had some deeply buried feelings for, touching him so casually was setting off all sorts of alarm bells in his brain.

"...got it?" Valerie was saying.

Certainly, she had said something.

Something that Danny was supposed to be listening to.

Oh, shit. 

"Uh..." Danny tried to re-circuit his brain.

"Here, follow my lead. Okay? Breathe," she said. "Good. Now, tighten your abs."

Danny tried his best to follow.

"No, see, you're sucking in. Tightening your abs doesn't mean sucking in. It's like, okay, think of it this way. Try hardening your abs into a brick wall. Like, squeeze them together. Now—yeah, like that. Now, can you try adding your side and lower back into that brick wall too?"

"Try adding what?"

The corners of Valerie's lip twitched up. "The sides of your stomach? You have abs there too. And there are muscles in your lower back. That's all part of your core too. Remember what I said about your core's job to keep your body stable? Those muscles are all important for that."

"Valerie, I think you're really overestimating how in shape I am. I didn't even know there was more than one ab muscle, much less that there were abs on the sides of my body."

"Well, you have them, ghost boy."

"Doesn't help much if I can't feel them."

Valerie rolled her eyes. "Well, just try your best."

"Yes, Ma'am." Danny did his best to follow her lead while also struggling to ignore the fact that her hand was still on his stomach. 

He was so glad Tucker wasn't here to see his face. He could only hope that Valerie had come to the conclusion that the redness he could feel burning from his cheeks was proof that he was way more out of shape than she thought he was. That was still pretty embarrassing, and likely not even all wrong, but he would take it over the truth.

"Okay, now reset your shoulders. Stop hunching so much," she said.

"But the bar feels weird," Danny defended.

"Yeah, yeah, you'll get used to it. Stop looking down so much. You want your spine to be straight."

"I know." 

Half of what Valerie had been telling him for the past week was to straighten his spine. He couldn't help it if his back was a visual representation of his many years of late-night gaming. 

"Okay, now squat down." She leaned forward, and her dark eyes were just inches from his own. "No—look at me the whole time. Don't drop your eyes to your feet."

Oh, his face was burning burning now.

He slowly lowered his body, focusing on staying balanced as best as he could. Having a bar on his back was still a new sensation, and Valerie was refusing to let him load any weight onto it. Apparently, everyone started from an empty bar until they got the hang of the motion. Danny wasn't sure if that was something Valerie was just saying to be nice to him, or if that was actually true. 

He did try asking, and she just got offended that he would dare think so low of her that she would lie about something gym-related, and then she told him to stop screwing around and focus on the exercise.

So, it was fifty-fifty at this point.

"Keep going down," Valerie instructed, stepping back and thankfully removing her hand from him in the process.

Seriously, that had been the longest several seconds of his entire life and half-life combined.

"But I thought you weren't supposed to go past ninety degrees or something?" Danny asked from his invisible chair-like position in his squat.

"No, that's a lie. I think they just tell that to people who have butt-wink or bad mobility or something."

"The hell is butt-wink? See, now I just think you're making stuff up."

"I'm not! It's actually something you're doing right now." Valerie pointed at him in the mirror. "See how your pelvis is tucking in and curving your lower back? That's butt-wink." She moved to stand next to him and lowered down in a squat. "See my lower back? It's straight. This is how you want to be."

Danny wasn't aware that working out would just give him more things to be self-conscious about. He tried to straighten his lower back, but it was almost impossible to do so without feeling like he was going to fall on his ass. "Okay, then how do I fix that?"

"Well, I'm not exactly a doctor, so I'm sure it could be caused by a few different things. But the most common one I've heard is that butt wink happens when your core is shit. But it could also just as likely be an ankle and hip flexibility issue too."

Danny rolled his eyes. "As we've established, my core is shit. And I'm not flexible at all. "

"Yeah, I know," Valerie lamented. "I can't believe you've been fighting as Phantom for all these years and you haven't gone to the gym even once. Isn't Sam really into working out or something? Why didn't you ask to be her gym buddy?"

"Because I value my life." Danny paused. "My half-life, whatever. Tucker worked out with her once to prepare for the President's fitness test they did freshmen year, and I didn't stop hearing about it for months. She's ruthless."

"You know what, I believe that."

"Yup," Danny grunted, lowering to do another squat.

Two down, about five million more to go.

People actually enjoyed lifting weights? They came to the gym willingly? As in, of their own volition?

They seriously sweated and lifted heavy objects in a room surrounded by a bunch of equally sweaty, smelly strangers who were lifting other objects? 

And they thought it was fun?

That seemed absurd.

Valerie scrunched her nose at him.

"What?" Danny asked, his voice teetering past the line between speaking normally and whining, but he was far too exhausted to care. "Why are you looking at me like that? What am I doing wrong now?"

"No, it's just—" Valerie tilted her head. "Try widening your stance more. And maybe try pointing your toes out a little bit. That should help with your form. I mean, ideally, your ankle mobility would be better, but given it's pretty shit right now, this might be the best fix."

"God, I'm hopeless. Just give me the word and I'll leave."

"Oh, stop. You're not hopeless. You just need to stretch more. And train more."

Danny shuffled his feet and bent down into another squat. Having a wider stand did make the squat feel easier, but he wasn't about to admit that to her. "No, I am definitely hopeless. It'll be a blow to my ego, but I think I can emotionally recover if I leave the gym right now."

Valerie punched his arm, though it had no real power to it. She'd long since stopped legitimately trying to hurt him. 

Nevertheless, he would have sooner let Skulker capture him than pass up an opportunity to verbally torment Valerie. "Wow, I can't believe my ally is trying to beat me up and murder me in public. Especially while I'm trying to better myself in the gym."

"Oh, shut up." Although she tried to look angry, Danny could see the corners of her lips quirk into a smile. "Alright, your form is looking a lot better. It's still not perfect, but it's way better than when we started."

"Thank god."

"Maybe in a few weeks we can start adding plates."

A few weeks?

He must have let his internal expression show, because she once again snapped with, "It's normal for people to only squat the bar when they first start. It's way more important to get proper form than to lift heavy. You see that guy over there?"

She nodded across the room at a man doing chest presses. He was using weights that Danny could only dream of, pumping them up and down with a confidence that Danny was sure rivaled even Dash.

So the man looked alright to Danny, but apparently, that was the wrong conclusion to come to, if Valerie's critical eye was any judge.

"See how his elbows are basically straight out from his body? And see how he's not extending his arms all the way when he presses? He's rushing through the exercise. It's bad form, and while it may feel cool to lift heavy, bulky weights, if you can't even do the exercise properly, you just end up looking like a fool." She turned back to him. "Remember, you're in a gym. That means you're surrounded by people who have been doing this shit for years. Trust me when I say you're not going to impress anyone by rushing through the exercises to try to look cool."

"Aye-aye, captain."

It wasn't like he was going to impress anyone with the way he was wobbling while attempting to squat the naked bar, anyway.

"Alright, that's enough of a rest, I think. This time, let's actually do eight reps."

"Literal torture."

"Keep the whining up, and I might just call my blaster out."

Danny could see it in her eyes that she wasn't joking.

And so, he began.

****

[read more of my fics here]

Older than history itself

What if the oldest vampire was a Neanderthal girl 🤔

Offer me that deathless death

Oh, good God, let me give you my life

No one has painted me in over 400 years.

damn-well wedded to this here light!

Senpai says you’re welcome

I still haven't gotten any fic recs about Valerie's not-so-great experience with the school dance, so I decided to do something with it myself.

When Bruce “died” all his kids ended up gathering together for the reading of his will. Things were split pretty evenly between them with certain assets going to certain people (the company to Tim, the Manor to Alfred etc). At the end of the will there is one last line

“Don’t let your brother turn into a supervillian.”

All of the siblings are busy arguing about who Bruce might be talking about except for Tim and Cass, who are standing away from the group. Tim has an amused gleam in his eye and Cass is staring him down.

“Don’t you dare.” She signs at him knowing full well that Bruce was talking about Tim.

“I’m going to take over the League of Assassins.” He signs back to her.

Which was always the plan, he just couldn’t leave right away. Dick giving Damian Robin was a perfect excuse. Also, Bruce was def alive just lost in the time stream and the league would have the resources he needs to find answers.

Six months later, over 100 bases blown up, and with coordinates to recover Bruce, Tim returns to Gotham. He’s not alone though. Oh no. Drake Industries has had a complete overhaul under the leadership of the teenage heir and if all of the new employees are ninja assassins thats for Tim to know and no one else.

When Bruce returns he gets swarmed with questions from his kids about which brother he was referencing at the end of his will and he gives them all a confused look.

“Tim of course. The kid borrows my morals like library books.” At this, Dick goes ashen.

Tim? Bruce had been concerned about Tim? Tim who has been off the grid for the last 6 months doing god knows what?

“Tim should have known I was referencing him. He should have told you and the fact that he didn’t means I should be concerned.” Bruce glances to his son who can’t contain his smile.

“It’s hardly my fault the Ra’s has the charisma of a used gym sock. Besides, at least I offer benefits and paid time off. Also you don’t have to worry about the LOA anymore. They all work for me now.” He smiles a bit wider and then disappears into the shadows.

Bruce, who wrote that last line after going through Tim’s Young Justice Records, simply signs. “Could be worse. He could have become Gun Batman.” Which unloads an entirely new floodgate of questions from those around him, but as long as his kids are safe, happy, and still walking a mostly moral line then Bruce is happy.

motherfucker said PROFESSIONAL